Sometimes the comments made on news stories are just silly, banal banter from the self-righteous guru rattling on about something only partially related to the actual article.

And as Gawker has its sometimes off-color moments I think, in general, it has a fairly good crop of upper-educated people. Or, at least people that can pontificate in a more thoughtful and educated manner than that which you’ll see on Fox News or MSNBC.

Personally, I don’t shop there… at all. Not even in emergencies. I will go farther and pay more to stay out of that place.

But somewhere buried in the stack of comments following is a few gems. This one is notable:

“”We hate you because of who you are, Wal-Mart.” Or do we hate them because of who we are? As a whole. That in fact the big boxes are uneasy reflections of … us. Us. Good people. Great intentions. Thoughtful, umm, thoughts.

We eat McDonald’s because it’s cheap and easy and fast. We make jokes about Target and call it Tar-jay because it assuages guilt and lets us use a french accent and be in on the joke. We’ll run over a nun if she hits the crosswalk a millisecond off the light. We’ll send money to Haiti and Chile while stepping over some guy who lives in the cardboard box down the street. Unions have helped the country sometimes, unions have crushed the country/economy sometimes, micro and/or macro. And, et al.

It’s endless really, our contradictions. But we never really leave them behind. So we hate ourselves, in the overall, unless some shaggy dudes on boards or skates win some medals every few years. We seem to have built and live in a society in which 35 year old athletes making millions of dollars per year, are offered $100,000 to say they are, “going to Disney World,” if their team wins – when we know after they get off the field the absolutely last place they’d end up would be in line for “It’s A Small World.” But we buy into it. Or want to buy into it. We want to rent some innocence every once in while but, alas, it’s all been used up.”

I can appreciate bluntness from time to time. Its not a cynicism, really, its an honesty.

Too often, myself included, we let ourselves get swept up into the artificial world and forget to keep ourselves grounded.

Like the little fuzzy specks of dust on the beams of afternoon window light, we let ourselves become sucked up in the suspension of reality and forget the things that really matter.

(Waiting in the afternoon sunlight, Searcy, Ark.)

What are they? That’s for you to decide. The things that are of paramount importance to you are yours and yours alone.